Hey! I've been playing your White Monk class for the past day or so, and I hugely enjoyed it! I thought I'd leave some comments on my experience. Warning, all perspectives are from the lens of playing on Normal difficulty... I can't comment on how the effectiveness of various things would change in other difficulties.

First of all, I'd like to talk about my overall journey through the class.

White Monk starts off as an interesting ranged class, where your ammo is effectively stamina. This lead to mildly difficult first few bosses, as stamina costs were high and options for regenerating stamina were low. Extended battles against large groups or tanky foes led to running out of stamina, to which the only solution was an extended retreat until stamina was back up. I quickly dumped three points into Breathing Room, and the issue was solved from that point on. Once I was able to spam Air Render without losing net stamina, the game turned into turret defense. I'd stand in one place, enemies would attempt to reach me, and I'd pin them to prevent this. As long as no one reached me, Breathing Room kept my stamina high, and the game could continue. Whenever I 'lost,' Aura of Protection kept me alive until I created some distance. Earth Render was a welcome tool to assist in this.

This basic formula persisted throughout the starting dungeons, and the first few tier 2 dungeons. Then I 5/5'd Aura of Protection and Pummel, put them on auto-cast, and everything changed. Nobody could touch me anymore. Nothing could harm me. Everything took all the damage. 5/5'd Measured Blows and boosted my Strength until I could take Flexible Combat, and the bullshittery just got worse. The last time in the playthrough I ever backed away from a foe was The Master.

So is this class too strong? In normal difficulty, yes.

Anyways, I'd like to talk about talent trees. They're all very interesting and unique, but I have some comments. Given talent levels are as of level 42 on my character.Technique / Combat Techniques (1/0/0/0) - I found no reason to use this, besides early game relocation via rush.Technique / Tireless Combatant (3/0/0/0)- Levels in Breathing Room were critical early game to afford using Air Render each turn, no reason to invest otherwise. Considered trying for the third talent, but it wasn't worth the investment compared to other options.Technique / Rending (2/2/2/2)- Air Render: 8 range from just two talent points is literally insane, especially since it has built in tools to prevent targets from closing that distance. You can keep people nearly a screen length away by just playing clicking simulator with two points invested. I don't know why I'd ever bother to increase the rank for minor increases in movement slow, and any range gains are just unnecessary since it's already incredibly long ranged. - Earth Render: Incredibly useful in the early game to force enemies to keep their distance, and weaken tough targets. Haven't used it since level 23 or so, since damage output became high enough that nobody got close enough to warrant being forced back.- Aura Blast: Used it early game for crowds, on-hit effects from gloves and the damage from Air Render eventually made this irrelevant.- Far Fist: Used it a bit in the Daikara when I unlocked it, haven't used it at all in a while. Basic attacks do as much or more damage than this, so why bother with it?

This tree has lots of cool ideas, but is really only notable for Air Render (praised be its name), which is both a free attack at huge range, and carries a whole host of stacking nasty effects for anyone hit by it. It's cool that the other talents have effects based on Enervate, but they were really too insignificant on their own for me to devote turns to them. Why would I try to proc the damage echo on Far Fist, when I'd rather just keep the pinning effect proc'd via more Air Renders?

Technique / Mending (1/1/5/1)- Lifefont: Cool talent, massive synergy with Vitality. Great 'oh shit' viability. I could probably invest more points into this, but the base rewards are already good enough, and some of the increases from level are so small as to be negligible. Level 1 healing per step is 7 health, level 2 is 9. Neither of these numbers are significant, and the difference between them is basically easily ignored. They do stack nicely with the other teeny healing effects of the tree, so I don't regret the one point in this talent at all.- Chakra: Maybe the per-level increases get better with more talents, but at level 1 this talent is just 'remove one debuff, regen 24 health.' The health effect is, again, almost entirely irrelevant, but removing a random debuff is very nice. The description implies that this talent can remove more than one debuff with a higher level, but the level 2 version of Chakra still only removes 1 from yourself. In fact, the only difference between level 1 and level 2 is an extra 3 health regenerated. I get that this talent gives greater rewards by removing debuffs from enemies, but that's an incredibly fringe strategy. In most cases, I think I'd rather keep my enemies debuffed rather than regen an extra 24 life for an extra turn!- Revive: Now HERE's a crazy talent! Prevent myself from dying, proc the multiple buffs of Lifefont for free (even if off-cooldown), and trigger Chakra at a high level (also if off cooldown)? Please! Lifefont gives you increased healing factor, and Chakra triggers for 24 x 9 instant healing (not clear on if you still get the over time healing). It's crazy good in every way.- Holy Sign: Fringe use to remove some of the nastiest debuffs from yourself, or buffs from enemies. I would've put another point into it, but the character got so broken in general that it was just unnecessary.

Mixed bag with this tree. I love it, because it makes the already broken defensive capabilities of the class even more broken. At the same time, there's very little motivation to invest in either of the first two talents of the tree. I get that you're going for a general theme of 'lots of little sources of healing' but nothing is going to make spending a talent point for 2-3 extra regen appealing. Revive and Holy Sign are both incredibly useful, however.

Technique / Martial Arts (5/1/5/5)- Guided Hand: It's the mastery talent, pump it.- Spin Fist: It does some damage and it might stun. Pretty basic, not bad? Just significantly better things to do with your points, and your turns. I used it less than Aura Break. - Measured Blows: Holy tuna catman! Physical resistance pen and armor pen is basically everything we could ever ask for, and you slap extra attacks on top of it! The extra attacks are pretty much irrelevant early game since they're gated behind both criting and passing a percent chance test, but it really goes off late game on top of the other extra blow talents.- Pummel: Pretty much better Measured Blows for early game, Flexible Combat engine late game. I 5/5 it as fast as I could, then put it on auto-cast. If you've pumped enough Wil and Breathing Room, you only notice the stamina drain until level 30.

While I basically forgot the second talent here existed, the last two talents in this tree are positively mind-breaking in combination with Flexible Combat. I have pictures of combat logs that are just unbelievable. EVERYTHING DIES.

Technique / Transcending (1/1/1/2)- Enervate: I used it, like, twice. I get that you're going with a theme off of spreading the cancer that is stacked Enervate from one enemy to every enemy, but it just isn't compelling. Enervate's deleterious debuffs on enemies are delicious, and half the reason I love Rending Air. But attempting to Enervate multiple enemies is just so horribly inefficient, it's a waste of a turn. Still, this ability has its occasional uses.- Energy Osmosis: Maybe worth it if it was at all efficient to attempt to apply Enervate to a whole crowd. I appreciate the small buffs I get with 1 talent point.- Deplete Spirit: Never used, ever. You're already the tankiest thing ever with Aura of Protection, no point in reducing the enemy's damage further. I'd rather keep them unable to move than do less damage. Further talent points also seem to produce very little improvement.- Transcend: The entire reason I spec'd into this tree, and even better than I thought it would be. There is nothing more hilarious than the combat logs after pressing The Big Red Transcend Button. It's a room clearer bar none. It stacks in positively dirty ways with Measured Blows, Pummel, and Flexible Combat. I have never ended Transcend with less health than I started - usually, I come out healthier. 50% damage resistance to everything, with raised caps? On top of Aura of Protection? What is going on?!? Anything and everything within it's AOE just... disappears. Broken with a capital B, but only because of hit-stacking capabilities from synergy with MB, Pummel, and FC. Didn't bother increasing it past 2 points because the only thing that changed was the damage of the two hits (which aren't the source of most of the damage from Transcend anyways), and not by that much.

Technique / Black Belt (2/1/1/5)- Secret Fist: Cool technique, I use it from time to time for the ability to disable enemy techniques.- Blink Counter: Very cool idea, doesn't see almost any use because if there's enough enemies that I'm getting surrounded, I'm probably about to Transcend and there won't be any enemies yet. In practice it's not the easiest to use, because the fact that it shoves enemies away decreases the amount of damage it does (since they aren't next to you to attack you). Still cool for kiting.- Withering Strike: I like how this ability implies you ever take damage. Also, the improvement of this ability per talent point is horrible. - Reflex: Just in case you aren't tanky enough, here's stacking resistance to EVERYTHING.

I really only spec'd into this tree for stacking resistance to everything, because it's freaking stacking resistance to everything.

Cunning / Tactical (1/1/1/5)If you've played Brawler, you already know that Exploit Weakness is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The rest of the tree is also pretty solid, I'll be investing in it more later.

GENERICS

Race / Shalore (1/5/1/2)- Yeah, not everyone will play Shalore (I almost never do) but just including it for posterity. I leave Grace of the Eternals on autocast. The second racial is nice for Measured Blows synergy.

Technique / Conditioning (4/5/1/1) - Vitality: I like the way this stacks up with Lifefont. Any rare dip below 50% health is very very temporary. - Unflinching Resolve: It's always been amazing, it always will be amazing.- Daunting Presence: Only put a point here to get to the next one.- Adrenaline Surge: Picked it up because I thought it would be funny to stack more damage reduction. I just put it on autocast. In a higher difficulty, it might genuinely have value for returning precious precious stamina to you. White Monk is dead in the water without stamina.

Cunning / Survival (1/0/0/0)How much you care about this tree is personal preference. It's nice that White Monk has it.

Technique / Fending (5/3/3/1)- Aura of Protection: I'm genuinely not sure if there's something wrong with the code for this. This ability makes me feel like I never take damage, and I do not notice any significant stamina drops as a result. In any case, this thing blocks insane amounts of damage since damage usually comes at you in a lot of little chunks rather than big ones. So Aura gets to work its magic multiple times. The only time my health drops, something massive has hit me all at once.- Respite: Potentially the culprit for why Aura doesn't seem to harm my stamina pool. Great ability for sustain, but really only exists because White Monk came here to kick ass and spend stamina... and it's all out of stamina.- Warded Mind: Nice. I hate mind debuffs. Stopped investing after 3 talents because the improvement stopped being significant. - Focused Guard: Very interesting ability. I don't use it. While the potential payoff is... well... massive, the drain of 10% of my stamina is not something I'm willing to deal with. White Monk sans stamina is Dead Monk, I don't care how many attacks are blocked. Genuinely seems to get worse with investment, because it blocks more and more attacks for the same insane stamina cost. At level 1 it could drain a lot of my stamina to block some deadly stuff. At level 2 it could leave me nearly without stamina to block just a hit or two more! It doesn't matter how much damage is blocked, if I don't have enough stamina left at the end to kill whatever's attacking me, it'll just attack me again and I'll be dead.

Technique / Agile Combatant (1/4/2/0)- Swift Strike: Cool concept. It's cripplingly costly at early levels. I used it in the first dungeon or two, but stopped since each time I did I ran out of stamina to actually fight. Doesn't seem to scale all that well, either. Never bothered to level it, since I already had mobility options in the form of teleport runes and rush. The damage component of Swift Strike didn't make it attractive enough to spend generic points on. - Agile Combatant: Put points in because pls moar stamina, stopped investing when it stopped scaling well. - Unhindered Movements: Super nice benefits, scales amazingly well for first two points, then not badly but not worthwhile after two points.- Nimble Defender: Really a let-down for a final talent. Not going to bother investing when I'm already tanky enough to not bother dodging. If I remember correctly, the Brawler equivalent of this talent worked differently in a way that was genuinely useful.

This tree could really use some spicing up.

Technique / Mobility (-----)- Haven't gotten enough cat points to open it up, but I imagine the damage reduction on top of how goddamn tanky White Monk already is would be hilarious.

Other comments:- Your techniques are definitely all very innovative and interesting. I loved figuring out how to abuse them. If I had to pick an overall design weakness, I would say that your talents all start strong, and most of them scale very poorly. There is rarely incentive to level them. - I invested in a lot of Strength simply for the ability to take Flexible Combat. It was 100% worth, but that Strength really isn't doing anything otherwise. Would be nice for there to be some other reason to take Strength. - Offensive power in this class seems overly reliant on lucking into strong gloves. The bullshittery of this class is the sheer number of blows it can land, which all proc the offensive abilities of the gloves you wear. But this is basically ineffective unless you have gloves worth wearing. Consider bumping the aoe power of low level White Monk a bit, since they suffer from not having had a chance to get gloves which themselves carry good aoe.- Transcend is an obscene powerspike on the end of a mostly un-impactful tree. Consider nerfing it, or the talents which cascade off of it (Measured Blows, Pummel, Flexible Combat). I'm not exaggerating when I say that I'm pretty sure I've landed Trascends that made over 100 hits. The fact that it's not capped by number of enemies, and can hit anyone within range 8 twice (initially at least), leads to absurd glove ability procs. Storm Bringer's Gauntlets for example, proc Chain Lightning at 20% chance. If you hit 10 enemies twice each with Transcend, then more and more with the follow on blows, that stacks up to a lot of Chain Lightning casts that hit the entire group. The punches and the Chain Lightning can crit, and a buttload of damage comes down. It's also worth mentioning that Exploit Weakness combos with all the punch stackings.

I hope some of the things I've mentioned are helpful to you in designing this awesome class going forward, and thank you so much for the work you've already done!

Hey! I've been playing your White Monk class for the past day or so, and I hugely enjoyed it! I thought I'd leave some comments on my experience. Warning, all perspectives are from the lens of playing on Normal difficulty... I can't comment on how the effectiveness of various things would change in other difficulties.

Hey, I'm really glad you enjoy the class, and thanks for all of the detailed feedback!

Sorry for the delayed response. Looks like this was your first forum post, which means it was delayed by the approval process. I missed it because the post doesn't get bumped to the top of the list when the message is approved; it goes by the date it was originally submitted.

I would agree that the class is generally strong, and certainly over-powered on Normal, at least at the hands of an experienced player. You are right that a lot of talent won't see much use on Normal, since your damage output is great and your defenses are fantastic. Things change a lot on higher difficulties. Most notably, even on Nightmare, mobs are much more resistant to statuses, which means theywill end up in your face a lot more often, changing a lot of the strategy of the class. This is where some of the talents that are not really needed on Normal come into play.

Regarding Revive, the instant healing is only from 'overflow' regeneration. Meaning if more than 8 (effective) ailments are removed, the extra is turned into instant healing rather than more turns of regeneration. So you get both; more instant healing if you clear a lot of debuffs.

Aura of Protection definitely needs some tweaking, but I'm weary of nerfing it too much as it is the core defense of the class. I would need to do a lot of testing, which is something I don't have the free time for, currently.

Focused Guard only drains 10% of your current stamina, meaning the amount you have when it procs; the less stamina you have, the lower the drain. It's intended for situations where your stamina is already so low that Aura of Protection won't trigger. Focused Guard will protect you, and it can never completely deplete your stamina (meaning sustains stay up, etc.).

Agile Combatant was designed before Mobility was reworked and Light Armor Training was a thing. After the changes, there was a lot of overlap that I cleaned out, which left the tree a bit lack luster. Along with Aura of Protection, this is something I would like to work on eventually. Nerfing Aura and adding some other type of defensive ability to Agile Combatant talents could help balance things out.

Early levels could definitely use a power boost, especially if you can't find good gloves. That's something I'd like to work on, too.

Again, glad you enjoy the class, and sorry for the late reply. Hope you continue to try it out, and I would encourage you try a higher difficulty. I would love to hear how your experience differed on a Nightmare or higher run.

Technique / Combat Techniques (1/0/0/0)- I found no reason to use this, besides early game relocation via rush.

Perfect Strike and (for non-Shalore) Blinding Speed are both really good. Accuracy is underrated: it's used to apply all the melee procs like "30% chance to blind" (except for slow and disease which ignore saves for some reason), and consistently landing those is a lot better than not consistently landing them.

TaskRabbit wrote:

- Aura Blast: Used it early game for crowds, on-hit effects from gloves and the damage from Air Render eventually made this irrelevant.- Far Fist: Used it a bit in the Daikara when I unlocked it, haven't used it at all in a while. Basic attacks do as much or more damage than this, so why bother with it?

Both of these offer far more damage than Air Render.

Don't think of Lifefont and Agile Combatant as giving you X life/stamina per game turn, because movement infusions exist and allow you to move many times in one game turn.

Aura of Protection isn't bugged, the reason you take 0 damage often is that you have flat damage reduction from Martial Arts. It could definitely be too strong but it isn't bugged. Compare to Psyshot's Molten Iron Blood + Automated Cloak Tesselation.

The Enervate talent is good since it lets the effect stack up to 6 instead of 4, which means more Aura Blast and Far Fist damage and more Deplete Spirit effectiveness. Speaking of which, Deplete Spirit is good.

I think you're overrating Transcend. It's certainly very good, and likely somewhat overpowered, but you seem to be thinking of the case where you use it with a bunch of monsters on the screen, and having a bunch of monsters on the screen is bad in the first place; you should pretty much always fight as few monsters as possible at once. As you allude to, the resistance and cap bonus makes it hard to take a lot of damage during it, but unlike Shadow Veil it does not provide immunity to status effects which can be a serious problem. You also don't mention that it ignores your global and attack speed and simply attacks once per game turn, so the damage per time is typically better with other talents.

Blink Counter is very good and combines great with Transcend. With enough talent point investment it makes you nearly immune to melee and archery for its duration, and melee and archery are the biggest damage sources in the game.

Reflex is one of the class's least useful talents IMO; losing that much of your max life to one damage instance is pretty rare outside Madness, and there are better passives than +2% crit mult per level. I suppose you could abuse it by hitting yourself in advance with something that has stable damage.

I can't think of any talents that scale badly with talent levels other than Air Render.

Re: Aura of Protection, I think nerfing it by pretty much any amount is safe because the class still has Trained Reactions.

After volunteering White Monk talents for the Weekly Adventurer Challenge, I decided to revisit the class. There were many things I wanted to change. Mostly, I really wanted to do away with Tireless Combatant. It was only useful for stamina regen, which White Monk really needs, but basically nothing else. Also, I felt Mobility was too centralizing. White Monk has a lot of their own defenses and I don't want anyone to feel they must use one of their cat points to access Trained Reactions or to end up restricted on generic points. Changes detailed below, except for those which I inevitably forgot about.

v1.5.0---[General]Removed Tireless Combatant and Mobility.

Locked Combat Techniques and Conditioning.

Agile Combatant is now a class category.

Several tweaks to numbers and scaling on talents all around. Many hard limits removed. Tweaks to investment bonus numbers.

[Mending]Investment bonus changed from healing mod to stamina regen.

[Chakra]Now self-target only. Heals for a small amount and cleanses random physical debuffs. Cooldown is fairly low, but cost is fairly high.

[Aura of Protection]Nerfed. Still provides the same damage reduction, but the cost will be considerably higher.

[Respite]Now also restores stamina at the start of a turn when you have been attacked during the previous turn but your life is no lower than it was when the first attack was made, as well as when 'dodging' as before. This is in an effort to make this interact better with evasion, damage shields, and so on.

[Focused Guard]Now restores 4% of your maximum stamina when it deflects a hit, rather than draining 10% of your current stamina.

[Air Render]Learning Air Render gives all of your melee attacks a chance to cause and/or spread Enervate, much as Air Render did before.

[Guided Hand]Now adds a small amount of physical damage based on Wil to all melee hits.

[Nimble Defender]Now grants armor based on defense, as well as projectile slow.

[Enervate]Now spreads the effect in a radius of 4 if the target is already affected by Enervate, up from 2.

[Energy Osmosis]Removed the enemy count cap.

[Withering Strike]Reworked. Now deals damage based on the target's life and prevents the target from healing above its remaining life level for several turns if the strike hits.

[Reflex]Reworked.Now increases physical crit chance.Melee crits will have a chance to apply Secret Fist.Incoming damage above a threshold based on max life will have a chance to trigger Blink Counter.

I really like most of these changes but there are some serious balance issues:- The bleed damage on Earth Render is too high early but we already discussed that in in-game chat.- With the buffed Agile Combatant, a movement infusion recovers most or all of your stamina bar and cools down your talents, without passing much time. This makes the passive bonus from Mending very unappealing by comparison.- Reflex is nuts. In previous versions of the class, building up crit chance was a major itemization challenge, now you get +45% from this one talent and 15% crit mult from it too. For comparison, Magic of the Eternals at 5/5 gives you only 10% crit chance and 20% crit mult, and many physical classes still want to 5/5 it with generic points (which are normally more valuable than class points). AND it gives you easy Secret Fists on everything you attack. Secret Fist is kept in check by being in a locked category, requiring you to be in melee, costing stamina, and having a cooldown. Being able to apply Secret Fist with Rending talents (and everything else) gets rid of the melee/stamina/cooldown restrictions entirely, and when combined with the aforementioned +45% crit chance and Pummel, it's very reliable. I would just get rid of the Secret Fist part of Reflex entirely, Secret Fist stands very well on its own.

Blink Counter is also good on its own but the Blink Counter trigger on Reflex is fine since it requires something that you don't want to deliberately induce (getting hit for a lot of damage).

Finally, if you happen to have Ashes enabled and find The Black Plate (or play adventurer), you can use it to link of pain an arcane amplification drone or god piece to an enemy, take off the plate, then use the new Withering Strike on the drone or god piece to do roughly 12,000% or 10,000,000% unarmed damage respectively, and one-shot your chosen target through the link of pain. But Static Field is in vanilla and can do the same thing so whatever.

edit: also, Agile Combatant stamina regen is very easy to get past 12 now, which means Never Stop Running can be used to regenerate all your life and stamina, at any time...

Appreciate the feedback, once again. I see your points, and I agree that some stuff came out overtuned. Reflex was totally reworked and, as usual, I went way overboard on the first draft of this version. I forgot about NSR being a thing, and I definitely over-buffed AC trying to compensate for removing Tireless Combatant. Anyway, I'm taking everything into consideration and working on an update that will address these balance issues.

I met a level 100+ randboss that had aura of protection at 94%...No need to say it was unkillable as resist pen has no effect and I did not have entropy that is the only talent that could remove the aura.Could you add a cap to the reduction? Maybe 50% could be fine.

Yeah, that sounds pretty frightening. I'll look at the numbers again and add some kind of cap, or a bigger nerf to NPC use of the talent. IIRC, I added a level/5 flat.increase to the cost of damage deduction when the talent is being used by a mob, but this was mostly because NPCs cheat resource regeneration, not really to make it possible to burst through all of their stamina to kill the aura. Not that anyone would know without checking the code; it's not advertised in the description or anything.

The other option is to just straight up stop NPCs from using it, because simply having a few talents that use a resource other than stamina is enough to really unbalance things.

I considered some other ideas, and I might return to one of them at some point, but for now this is fine. More than fair to the player (I think about 35% was the highest I ever got this on a player in the AoA campaign).

I looked around a bit for a class icon, but couldn't find a decent one in a moderate amount of time. I may look around some more at some point, but it's not a huge priority. If anyone wants to donate some art, I'd be more than happy to consider it

Got an error seemingly related to this mod when fighting the... amalgamation? In the forbidden cults dlc. Specifically it cropped up after a number of drem split off from the boss. Seemed to pop a lua error whenever any creature acted, but I'm not sure if all of them proc'd it or just one ability on one of them, if they spawned with the class. The stack also references improved-restauto, so maybe a mod conflict?

Appreciate the info, I uploaded a patch that should fix the problem. It's going to be hard for me to test, though. I'm still not sure exactly what was happening. It seems like it may have been because the field of vision list was empty, but that would occur any time there are no other actors in sight, and I'm sure that didn't give any errors... so if that's not the case, I'm not sure what's causing the act value to be nil.

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